I came across this link a while back, but somehow failed to share. Christoph Niemann, a talented artist with a good sense of humor, illustrates his flight from New York to Berlin. It’s not a laughing out loud collection of images, but it’ll make you smile.

After the upgrade to Fedora 22 last night, I was looking for a new desktop background image, to change the mood. Surprisingly, one of the top search results pointed me to the Microsoft website, which has a selection of some really good background images. Backyard bonfire works well for me.

Splashnology – a place for creative designers and digital artists. There is a tonne of cool artwork varying from icons and logos to portraits and web design. Here are just a few images off the front page to give you a taste (one, two, three).

As he entered the Salon Carré, the thief headed straight for the Mona Lisa. Lifting down the painting and carrying it into an enclosed stairwell nearby was no easy job. The painting itself weighs approximately 18 pounds, since Leonardo painted it not on canvas but on three slabs of wood, a fairly common practice during the Renaissance. A few months earlier, the museum’s directors had taken steps to physically protect the Mona Lisa by reinforcing it with a massive wooden brace and placing it inside a glass-fronted box, adding 150 pounds to its weight. The decorative Renaissance frame brought the total to nearly 200 pounds. However, only four sturdy hooks held it there, no more securely than if it had been hung in the house of a bourgeois Parisian. Museum officials would later explain that the paintings were fastened to the wall in this way to make it easy for guards to remove them in case of fire.

Slashdot is linking to Ekisto – a project to visualize online communities like if they were cities. So far there are only GitHub, StackOverflow and Friendfeed (really? Friendfeed?). I’ve seen plenty of data visualization, especially for GitHub, but I have to say that this is one of the most interesting ones ever.

Here is a quote from the About page that explains how it works:

Ekisto comes from ekistics, the science of human settlements.

Ekisto is an interactive visualization of three online communities: StackOverflow, Github and Friendfeed. Ekisto tries to imagine and map our online habitats using graph algorithms and the city as a metaphor.

A graph layout algorithm arranges users in 2D space based on their similarity. Cosine similarity is computed based on the users’ network (Friendfeed), collaborate, watch, fork and follow relationships (Github), or based on the tags of posts contributed by users (StackOverflow). The height of each user represents the normalized value of the user’s Pagerank (Github, Friendfeed) or their reputation points (StackOverflow).